Not Alone
by Laura Schiller
Summary: After the burning of Brimstone's shop, Zuzana struggles with her own skepticism in order to take care of Karou.


Not Alone

By Laura Schiller

Based on: Daughter of Smoke and Bone

Copyright: Laini Taylor

Zuzana could not believe her senses.

First there had been Karou, holed up inside her apartment for three days, bruised and feverish and sporting claw marks on her arms and throat, telling her wild stories about Brimstone and battles with angels. Zuzana had come close to flipping her lid in that moment, ready to throw up her hands and stomp out; if Karou couldn't be bothered to tell her the truth about something this serious, she reasoned, it was obviously a shrink the blue-haired girl needed, not a friend.

And then –

That creature. A bat-crow hybrid just like the one in Karou's sketchbooks, a zoological impossibility, flying in through the window on burning wings. Karou holding it in her hands, muttering _no, no, no,_ mourning over it as Zuzana had done for her own pet canaries when she was ten. Karou running out into the street without her coat, blue hair streaming, until she reeled to a breathless stop in front of an abandoned, burning building. Burning in a blue-white fire completely unaffected by the firefighters' water hoses.

Karou froze, hands wrapped around her waist, shoulders hunched, shivering.

"Karou?"

No reaction.

"Karou, c'mon!"

Zuzana's eyes began to water from the smoke; she blinked hard, but her vision was still blurred. Silhouettes of firefighters in their orange uniforms, with their reflective yellow safety strips on the back, were moving rapidly around. Some appeared to be guarding the neighboring houses, but strangely enough, the fire refused to spread there. Passersby gathered to watch, pointing and exclaiming, awed by the terrifying beauty of the flames. Karou just stood there, watching it all, with the emptiest black eyes Zuzana had ever seen.

"It's not safe here," Zuzana insisted, tugging on the other girl's bare arm. "We've got to get you back to your apartment. You're still running a fever, remember? If you die of pneumonia from this, crazy girl, I swear I'll never speak to you again!"

Between fear, anxiety and the smoke making her cough, Zuzana hardly knew what she was saying. The bad joke seemed to trigger something, however, since her friend blinked down at her and, with a distant trace of life in her white face, began to move.

Zuzana pulled Karou's arm across her shoulders and her own arm around Karou's waist, and so they made their staggering way through the snowy streets. Heavy work as it was, it didn't even occur to her to tease the taller girl about too many apple strudels at Poison. Seeing Karou helpless like this frightened her more than anything – more than the blue fire, even more than the bat-crow. Karou had always seemed so confident to her, like a glamorous movie star, someone who never needed help from anyone. For a short, abrasive, lonely girl from a family of crazy puppetmakers, it had been an honor to become her friend.

This was the moment she could begin to pay that honor back. But, holy hell, did it have to be like this?

Somehow, having maneuvered her charge out of her wet clothes and into pajamas and bed, Zuzana kicked off her platform boots and collapsed into an armchair. Her head was spinning. Should she ask one of the million questions she had been biting down ever since they first met? Should she let Karou fall asleep and quietly let herself out? Or should she stay the night?

"So," rasped Karou, smiling darkly from her pile of pillows. "Do you believe me now about the sketchbooks?"

"God, I don't know." Zuzana shook her head. "It all just seems so … surreal. Like I'm just waiting for Auntie Daria to yell at me to get up, I'm gonna be late for school. That bird thing - "

"Kishmish," Karou snapped. "His name was Kishmish."

Zuzana had giggled over the sound of that name so often when she thought it was fictional that she had to struggle to keep a straight face.

"Please tell me he didn't really have bat wings," she sighed. "Tell me I'm tripping out, I don't know, from smoke or paint fumes or something."

"You're not tripping out," said Karou. "He does – _did_ have bat wings. He's been carrying notes to me from Brimstone as long as I can remember. All those errands, Zuzana, all those times I had to blow you off? That was him, telling me Brimstone wanted me to pick up teeth for him halfway across the world. And that fire? That was the portal to his shop, my _home_, and I don't know if I'll ever see my family again or if they're even alive! So I don't need you trying to decide whether they're real or not, okay? You can take your skepticism and shove it, just get out of here!"

She rolled over with a loud creak of bedsprings, buried her face in the topmost pillow, and began to cry, her thin shoulders shaking underneath the quilt.

That, more than anything, convinced Zuzana that her friend was telling the truth.

"I'm not going anywhere," she said softly, crossing the room to climb up on the bed next to Karou. It was a massive four-poster with room to spare, even with all the books and CD's scattered across the unused left side. Zuzana picked her way around them, crawled over to Karou, and began to gently stroke her back. "You're lucky I have a high tolerance for rudeness. Of course I believe you, silly. And of course you're going to see them again."

"You don't know that," Karou sobbed into the pillow.

"Maybe they weren't there when the fire broke out," Zuzana reasoned. "We can find out what happened. Go back, investigate, get our Holmes and Watson on. Find out who set that fire and make them wish they'd never been born."

Karou made a hoarse, muffled sound that might have been a laugh. "Angels," she croaked. "It was angels, Zuze. I know you're a badass, but even you couldn't take them."

"Holy hell," Zuzana breathed. Angels? Just when she'd thought it couldn't get any more bizarre.

"More things in heaven and earth, Horatio," Karou quoted, blinking wet black eyes up at Zuzana and smiling faintly at her shocked expression. It was the first smile Zuzana had seen from her in this entire horrible day, and it gave her hope that the charming, creative, indomitable girl she knew was not entirely lost.

There was nothing she wanted more than to see Karou smile again.

"So … can you show me?"

"Show you what?"

"You know … the magic."

Karou held up her arm, where she wore a familiar multistrand beaded bracelet. "I've only got some scuppies on me. They're not good for much."

"Pretty please?" Zuzana widened her eyes and clasped her hands in an exaggerated little-girl fashion, forcing a sigh out of Karou that was almost a laugh.

"Okay, okay. Here." She ran a finger along the bracelet. Squinting, Zuzana saw several beads vanish into thin air. "Now look in the mirror."

"Hey, if you give me a pig snout or something - "

"Just look."

Zuzana headed for the bathroom with a beating heart. It was one thing to see a creature that was never found in any zoo, but to have someone working magic on her body? She didn't feel any different. What should she see?

She gasped.

Her own face looked back at her – brown-eyed, sharp-nosed, high-cheekboned, interesting but never beautiful. With one exception: the spots of acne on her chin and forehead, which had stubbornly survived toothpaste, cold cream and various astringents, caused her aunt to shake her head with worry, her big brother to nickname her "pizza face", and several boys to look the other way, were simply gone.

Her skin was perfect.

"_Now_ will you finally put the moves on Violin Boy?" came Karou's voice through the door. "Or will you find something else on your face to worry about? You can't keep making excuses forever, Zuze. You're the bravest girl I know."

"Oh, Karou … "

It hit her then, the true beauty of her friend's character. For all the long months of their friendship, Karou had joked with her, supported her, listened to her whine about endless silly things like Wiktor and his feather boa, and cheered her on in her pursuit of the handsome Mikolas Vavra, all while living a life of genuine hardship, genuine danger, that made Zuzana's problems look like child's play. The mad Moraccan with his invisible rider, the bloody-mouthed girls in Saint Petersburg, the gunfight and the teeth – all of which she'd taken for products of Karou's morbid imagination – had been real, and Karou had kept all this pain and grief to herself so as not to unsettle her friend.

Until today, when she simply couldn't anymore.

It was Zuzana's turn to feel like crying.

She ran back to the bed and threw her arms around the other girl instead, stroking her tangled blue hair over and over, just as Issa had done when she was a child. Karou closed her eyes and leaned into her. For once in their long history of banter, there was no need for words. _I'm here_, her hands said. _You're not alone._

It was enough.


End file.
